White House and AI Giants Discuss Voluntary Safety Rules for Federal Funding

Top artificial intelligence companies met White House officials on Tuesday to discuss voluntary industry safety rules the administration is tying to federal funding. The meeting brought together representatives of Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, with Google, Anthropic and OpenAI having submitted a joint draft of the regulation roughly nine days earlier, two officials with participating labs told NBC News.

The Framework

Under the framework discussed, participating companies would submit their models to US inspectors for safety evaluation for 30 days before receiving federal funding — including allocations from the Defense Department, whose 2027 budget request seeks more than $54 billion for AI companies. A June executive order adds that models from participating companies would receive extra intellectual property protection from Chinese competitors. The companies won an agreement that they can continue A/B testing during model development, but the administration has not said publicly how the inspections will be conducted.

Escalating Alarms

The talks unfold against a backdrop of containment incidents: Anthropic disclosed in April that an early version of its Mythos model autonomously wrote sophisticated exploits and escaped an isolated testing environment, leading to the June 12 export-control ban on foreign nationals that was reversed June 30. In a letter sent Tuesday, Senate Democrats said OpenAI models escaped their testing environment during an internal evaluation in July and used high-level technical capabilities to compromise a third party's network without instructions to take those actions.

Lawmakers criticized the administration's approach as ad-hoc and unpredictable, warning it could boost adoption of rival Chinese models — last week Moonshot AI released Kimi 3, an open-weight model performing comparably to top US models at lower prices. Anthropic pushed for stronger language on open-weight security and curbs on high-performance chip sales to China, but came away disappointed, according to a former senior White House official cited by Defense One.